Hacker News: phendrenad2

New comment by phendrenad2 in "Programming Used to Be Free"

phendrenad2 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:58:58 +0000

This depends on your definitions of "free" and "programming". Can you afford a PC? Can you afford internet to access documentation? A lot of people can't. Likewise, what is "programming" to you? Hello World in Python? Or fixing a driver bug in the Linux kernel? Those are worlds apart in terms of hardware requirements just to complete the build.

New comment by phendrenad2 in "Google removes "Doki Doki Literature Club" from Google Play"

phendrenad2 — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 22:56:22 +0000

I'm intentionally not reading your post, but the "it's old so I can spoil it" is never an acceptable stance in a world where they keep making more people. The world doesn't begin and end with your experience.

New comment by phendrenad2 in "I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack"

phendrenad2 — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 17:10:28 +0000

This seems extremely spartan. Live a little, splurge on the 2GB server and MariaDB instead of SQLite!

New comment by phendrenad2 in "Trump says 'a whole civilization will die tonight' if Iran does not make a deal"

phendrenad2 — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 19:05:02 +0000

Where did he say that?

New comment by phendrenad2 in "Void Linux: Enterprise Edition"

phendrenad2 — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:38:34 +0000

An April 1st joke from 10 days ago? Nice job, whoever programmed this bot.

New comment by phendrenad2 in "Helium is hard to replace"

phendrenad2 — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:37:03 +0000

To be fair, the decision to get sell off the strategic helium reserve wasn't a single point in time, it happened little by little, and the original idea came at a time when helium didn't really have a strategic purpose. The last major use for it was military spy balloons sent over western europe to keep tabs on the USSR... Yeah that USSR. They couldn't have anticipated that it would suddenly become ultra-useful for post-2010 semiconductor lithography.

New comment by phendrenad2 in "Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers"

phendrenad2 — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:57:26 +0000

It's an interesting idea, and it might even work for some people who have overpowered gaming laptops that can't run Windows 11 (thanks, Microsoft!). But man, people have no idea how powerful just a few cores of a modern AMD EPYC are. Try a Linode instance with a few dedicated cores and see if that's competitive with shipping your old alienware to a colo.

New comment by phendrenad2 in "Afrika Bambaataa has died"

phendrenad2 — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:55:11 +0000

Great bumper music for the progressive history podcast _Blowback_.

New comment by phendrenad2 in "Afrika Bambaataa has died"

phendrenad2 — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:54:12 +0000

I've read this a number of times, and dismissed it because there's no proof. But, I'm beginning to believe it, given the sheer amount of different sources saying it.

New comment by phendrenad2 in "Research-Driven Agents: When an agent reads before it codes"

phendrenad2 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:08:50 +0000

You mean this part?

> TL;DR: Coding agents generate better optimizations when they read papers and study competing projects before touching code

What made you think I hadn't read the article, let alone that TL;DR? I'm really curious. Jumping to an insulting "have you read the article" is a big step, so it'll be really interesting to see where your mind went.

New comment by phendrenad2 in "Research-Driven Agents: When an agent reads before it codes"

phendrenad2 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:46:50 +0000

This is obvious, right? If you want to build a Facebook clone, you wouldn't tell the agent "build Facebook". You would provide it with a description of every page on Facebook, behaviors, interactions, UI, etc.

New comment by phendrenad2 in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

phendrenad2 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:43:04 +0000

> I'm surprised by how well abstracted MacOS is (was).

Usually the difference between something being well-abstracted vs poorly-abstracted is how well it's explained.

New comment by phendrenad2 in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

phendrenad2 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:20:03 +0000

Absolutely! And the best part is, you can fill in any recent "POTUS" in your statement and it still applies!

New comment by phendrenad2 in "Greece to ban under-15s from social media from next year"

phendrenad2 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:19:05 +0000

Right, you're entitled to your wrong opinion. Don't say we didn't warn you when you find out how wrong you were, and what the consequences are regarding government control of people's minds.

New comment by phendrenad2 in "Greece to ban under-15s from social media from next year"

phendrenad2 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:15:48 +0000

Nice strawman, I guess?

New comment by phendrenad2 in "US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology"

phendrenad2 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:15:15 +0000

If the only content of your post is sarcasm, please stick to Reddit. We like to stick to facts and reality here.

The sky is blue. See? I posted a fact. My comment is fully valid and you can't say anything about it. Oh? It's irrelevant to the topic?

It may be too subtle for you, but I was actually making the point that the surveillance panopticon theory was mostly triggered by the fact that Flock is cloud-based.

I'm basically making a distinction between a hypothetical non-cloud Flock vs cloud-Flock.

And it may be too complex a concept, but ex-lovers, union organizers, and journlists could use whatever camera-based ALPR existed, even if it wasn't cloud-based.

Making your comment irrelevant.

Thank you for it though.

New comment by phendrenad2 in "Midlife Sleep Irregularity Linked to Higher Risk of Major Cardiac Events"

phendrenad2 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:51:17 +0000

And not only that, people with comorbidities for major cardiac events have worse sleep (sleep apnea, etc.) Sort of a chicken-ekg situation. Nyuk nyuk.

New comment by phendrenad2 in "US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology"

phendrenad2 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:41:54 +0000

It's funny, if the company had just sold cameras to cities, they probably could have avoided this whole mess. But they just had to hit some keywords for Wall Street (like "AI" "cloud" and "SaaS"), which had the side-effect of making it appear (true or not) that they were part of a Palantir-style surveillance panopticon that tracks you everywhere.

New comment by phendrenad2 in "Greece to ban under-15s from social media from next year"

phendrenad2 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:36:11 +0000

Of course, many countries and states are doing similar things. Don't believe what they tell you, though. It's not about "rotting their brains", it's about social control. It's about keeping them from reading "misinformation" and "disinformation" at an early age, and coming to distrust "official" sources. This buys the government 15 whole years of pure, unadulterated, propaganda. Hope it makes good little citizens. Probably won't, though.

New comment by phendrenad2 in "You can't cancel a JavaScript promise (except sometimes you can)"

phendrenad2 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:33:04 +0000

Microsoft supports something god doesn't? That can't be right.